A blog about my interest in all things military, wargaming and last but not least my military vehicle adventures.

Saturday, 23 February 2013

Hiding the Lockheed Plant during World War II

Hidden in Plain View

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack.
They covered it with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Before...

After

The person that provided these pictures said she got an interesting story about someone's mother who worked at Lockheed, and she as a younger child, remembers all this. She says that to this day, these are the first pictures of it she's seen.

Another person who lived in the area talked about as being a boy, watching it all be set up like a movie studio production. They had fake houses, trees, etc. and moved parked cars around so it looked like a residential area from the skies overhead.

I lived in North Long Beach during World War II, I was 13 years old. (1940) The Long Beach airport was near Lakewood, CA. There was a large Boeing Plant there. If you would drive down Carson St.going south you could drive under the camouflage netting. (Ed Pollard)

I am 85 and had much of my pilot training in Calif. I have been under this net and have seen it from the air. During preflight training I rode a bus under the net and was very surprised as I didn't know it was there. It was strong enough to walk on and they hired people to ride bicycles and move around as if they lived there to make it look authentic. (Warren Holmgreen Jr)
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